National Gallery of Australia Publishing

The National Gallery of Australia publishes high-quality titles based on its collection, exhibitions and research written by experts in their field. The collection covers Australian art, Indigenous art, Asian art, Pacific art, American and European art, photography and decorative arts. The Gallery also publishes books for children and a quarterly full-colour magazine Artonview.

National Gallery of Australia books are available from the Gallery Shop, selected book stores nationally and via mail order.

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Constableimpressions of land, sea and sky

Anne Gray, John Cage and others

Drawing on more than 100 paintings, drawings and mezzotints from Australasia and around the world, this publication investigates Constable’s art-making process. It considers a range of his work, from early Lake District watercolours, and his oil sketches through to his late paintings, and such masterpieces as The wheatfield 1816, Salisbury Cathedral from the bishop’s grounds 1823, and A boat passing a lock 1826. It also examines his Hampstead cloud studies and his Brighton seascapes from the 1820s. The text notes how Constable’s spontaneous, fresh and natural works, along with those of JMW Turner, influenced early Australian landscape artists such as Conrad Martens and were greatly admired by Tom Roberts and Hans Heysen.

Published as part of the first major survey of Imants Tillers’ paintings in Australia, including his significant large-scale canvasboard works (including his Diaspora series and Terra incognita), this book traces the artist’s career from 1984 to 2006. It considers Tillers’ blending of personal themes with the postmodernist techniques of appropriation and quotation, as well as his investigation of identity, place, displacement and chance encounter and of the webs of connection across time and space.

Michael Riley (1960–2004), of Moree Kamilaroi and Dubbo Wiradjuri heritage, was one of Australia’s most significant contemporary Indigenous photographers. With delicate sensitivity, his work focuses on the disenfranchised Indigenous communities of eastern Australia. This publication forms a 20-year retrospective of his work, including his revealing portraiture of Moree and Dubbo community members and his investigations of the impact of Christianity upon Indigenous culture.

The first publication in the National Gallery’s The printed image: Australia, Asia, Pacific series, this title is also the first in-depth study of printmaking in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on the Gallery’s collection of over 600 such prints and drawings, it traces the art of PNG printmaking from the earliest-known prints of the 1960s, through the active and vibrant ‘70s and into the 21st century.

American-born James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was a key figure in nineteenth-century European art, and befriended some of the great artists who were to dominate the French art scene—including Edouard Manet and the writer–critic Charles Baudelaire. This publication reproduces three series of Whistler etchings: the so-called French Set (1858), featuring 12 figure studies and village scenes, the Thames Set (1861), featuring 16 etchings of river scenes, and the Venice Set, notable for its poetic qualities—presenting sublime visions, rather than depictions of the everyday. The text tells how, along with his admiration for the Venetian Masters, the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print was particularly influential on Whistler’s work.

Published in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia, this lavish publication profiles the art of Islam, focusing on artworks drawn from 14 key museums and libraries from Southeast Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Australia. The range of media encompasses jewellery and body adornment, manuscripts, maps, metalwork, paintings, weaponry and arms, sculpture (wood and stone), textiles and ceramics.

This publication covers both public and private aspects of the work of Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984), showing her keen attentiveness to the modern city environment, and her intimate response to more personal subjects. Among her varied themes are the Sydney Harbour Bridge (of which she painted some of the most iconic images), portraits, still lifes, landscapes, religious and war subjects, theatre and ballet performances, and domestic interiors. The artist was particularly entranced by wildflowers and the Australian light. This publication, featuring over 120 reproductions, includes a substantial amount of new information on the artist and makes special reference to the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of 52 of her sketchbooks.

This publication covers both public and private aspects of the work of Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984), showing her keen attentiveness to the modern city environment, and her intimate response to more personal subjects. Among her varied themes are the Sydney Harbour Bridge (of which she painted some of the most iconic images), portraits, still lifes, landscapes, religious and war subjects, theatre and ballet performances, and domestic interiors. The artist was particularly entranced by wildflowers and the Australian light. This publication, featuring over 120 reproductions, includes a substantial amount of new information on the artist and makes special reference to the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of 52 of her sketchbooks.

Like many Europeans of her generation, Margaret Michaelis’s life was severely dislocated by the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II, followed in her case by acute personal losses and challenges in finding a new path for her art and life in Australia. Helen Ennis journeys through the hundreds of photographs in Michaelis’s archive and visits relating sites in Spain, Germany and Austria. Crucial to Michaelis’s story are the dozens of love letters exchanged between her and her first husband, Michel, a prominent German anarchist. Ennis approaches the artistic legacy of Michaelis through an eloquent interweaving of her professional and personal life.

Drawing on 85 leading practitioners of studio craft in Australia and overseas, this publication presents a diverse and challenging selection of contemporary works from the National Gallery’s Decorative Arts and Design Collection and other works on loan. Crossing the fields of ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, jewellery, sculpture and metalwork, the works are approached under the headings of Narrative, Materiality and Structure. While inviting admiration as highly crafted often beautiful objects in themselves, the works also prompt consideration on the place of craft skills, traditions and values in an increasingly regimented culture of industrial consumption.

The 31 chefs who contributed to this publication include household names, television personalities and authors of best-selling books. Each was asked to choose a work of art from the Gallery’s Australian collection and respond to it in their own creative culinary way. The results are a feast for the eye and a temptation for the stomach. Chefs include Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Shannon Bennett, Teage Ezard, Margaret Fulton, Gabriel Gaté, Dorinda Hafner, Geoff Jansz, Kylie Kwong, Matthew Moran, Luke Mangan, Neil Perry, Stefano de Pieri and Charmaine Solomon.

Offering a window to both traditional and exotic culinary delights from Edwardian times, this book features 60 recipes, adapted and tested with the modern home kitchen in mind. Most of the recipes are given a contemporary edge to take advantage of 21st-century technology. The recipes—drawn from a variety of sources including novels, histories, period cookbooks and treasured family collections—range from Cornish pasties, English apple pies, Pavlovas, and Mulligatawny soup, through to crème princesse, Bakewell tart, and Scottish Parliament biscuits. The recipes are supplemented with colour photography, reproductions of Edwardian-era paintings, and are annotated by short extracts from historical sources.

Edited by Susan Jenkins with contributions by Nigel Lendon, Djon Mundine, Margaret West and Malangi family members

This book is a tribute to David Malangi Daymirringu (1927–1999), one of the most renowned of the Arnhem Land bark painters. It traces the development of his work, in which he recorded his patrilineally inherited land and ceremonies as well as those of his mother’s land and culture. The essays offer new research from prominent Aboriginal art scholars and curators, providing a social and historical context for Malangi’s work.

Established in Melbourne in 1981, the Australian Print Workshop (APW) has been a powerhouse in Australian printmaking, attracting many of Australia’s leading artists through its reputation for creative collaboration and excellent support facilities. This book celebrates the art the APW has produced, and discusses the artists’ stylistic, technical and political concerns. Among featured works are the Australian Bicentennial Print project of 1988, and the Wurreka 50-metre-long etched zinc wall mural by Judy Watson produced for the Melbourne Museum. APW’s work with Indigenous artists in remote communities is also discussed. The book highlights 93 works by 57 artists, ranging from realistic portraits to pixellated abstractions.

Over a 60-year working life Margaret Preston (1875–1963) established herself as one of Australia’s best-known artists. Her bright decorative prints of distinctively Australian subjects have delighted the public since the early 1920s. The National Gallery’s 1987 publication The prints of Margaret Preston: a catalogue raisonné was a historic event, being the first monograph the Gallery published on an individual artist, and also the first catalogue raisonné it produced. Following its publication, many more Preston works were discovered, and this new expanded edition reproduces a number of these prints for the first time while also filling some gaps in previous biographies, particularly on the period up Preston’s marriage in 1919. The emphasis throughout is on Preston as printmaker—her techniques and the influences on her work.

This account of the recent work of the Irish–American painter Sean Scully—widely regarded as one of the most significant contemporary painters—reproduces over 70 of his paintings, watercolours, pastel drawings and prints, and includes essays by renowned figures giving close readings of Scully’s work, and a reflection on the relationship of Scully’s paintings and spirituality. An interview with the painter outlines the trajectories of his recent work, and an extended photographic essay illustrates the complex process used to produce one of his large, visually-compelling abstract paintings.

London, along with Paris, was a primary artistic centre in the Edwardian years, from around 1900 to 1914. This publication focuses on connections between Australian, British, Irish, American and French artists drawn to London to live, work and study in that period. The work of these expatriate artists is placed in the context of British art of the time, and the advent of Modernism. Reproduced works (paintings and sculptures) range from sumptuous portraits of the British upper class and nouveaux riches through to representations of the middle and working classes, revealing the artistic shift from Tonalism to a more Formalist approach centring on bright colours and strong shapes.

Australia’s national art collection largely took shape in the short period between the late 1960s when the National Gallery project received the official go-ahead from government, and the building’s opening in 1982. Published 20 years after that opening, these essays tell how the various collections came into being and continue to evolve. Authors include the Gallery’s first three directors—James Mollison, Betty Churcher and Brian Kennedy, while other participants close to the collections’ formations provide commentary and stories as varied, insightful and interesting as the collections themselves.

Australia’s national art collection largely took shape in the short period between the late 1960s (when the National Gallery project received the official go-ahead from government), and the building’s opening in 1982. Published 20 years after that opening, these essays tell how the various collections came into being and continue to evolve. Authors include the Gallery’s first three directors, James Mollison, Betty Churcher and Brian Kennedy, while other participants close to the collections’ formations provide commentary and stories as varied, insightful and interesting as the collections themselves.

Featuring works by 55 of the greatest French painters from 1600 up to 1900—including Nicolas Poussin, Jacques-Louis David, Eugene Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Gustave Courbet—the styles seen here range from Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism and Romanticism through to Realism and Impressionism. Michel Hilaire and Olivier Zeder (respectively Director and Deputy-Director of the Musée Fabre at Montpellier) are joined by Jörg Zutter and a range of contributors from other international cultural institutions including the Louvre, and the National Gallery, London.

Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) was an influential French painter draughtsman, photographer, printmaker, illustrator and interior designer whose work continues to surprise and delight new generations of art lovers. This book brings together more than 110 paintings, drawings and lithographs from private and public collections. It focuses comprehensively on the evolution of Bonnard’s career, from his early Nabis works of 1890–1900 through to his large decorations of 1905–1912 and his nudes, portraits and landscapes of the 1920s and 1930s—closing with his stunning works up to World War II.

Sari to Sarongfive hundred years of Indian and Indonesian textile exchange

Robyn Maxwell

Drawn from the National Gallery’s extensive collection of silks, cottons, batiks, gold brocades, tie-dyes and embroideries, this book features some of the greatest surviving examples of traditional Indian and Indonesian textiles. Traversing the Indian Ocean via sailors and merchants, priests and warriors, these textiles feature Ramayana epics, elephant and camel processions, trading ships and floral designs. Sari to sarong documents the remarkable exchange of ideas, materials, design and imagery (royal and religious) which has occurred between the two great cultures of India and Indonesia.

This book celebrates master printer Kenneth Tyler’s creative collaboration with key artists of the post-war American art scene. It reproduces works in the National Gallery’s collection of editioned original prints, screens, paper works, illustrated books and multiples, along with rare and unique proofs and drawings from the Tyler workshop. Artists such as Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella produced some of their finest works with Tyler, in an atmosphere where collaboration engaged heart and mind, inspired innovation, response, and reaction, and the printer shaped his approach to each particular artist’s needs

This broad-sweeping survey of the National Gallery’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and decorative arts and design collections features more than 400 works. Indigenous and non-Indigenous works are represented, with iconic favourites such as Sidney Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ series set alongside important but lesser-known acquisitions. The works are arranged in chronological order, from 1770 to 2002—‘Pre-colonial and Colonial’ through to ‘Art Now’. Insightful essays from over 50 artists, curators and scholars, range from personal reflections by artists discussing their own works to more discursive or critical commentaries placing works in their historical context.

In the 1960s a new generation of European, American and Asian artists began exploring life and art in innovative ways, using film and video. This publication juxtaposes two such artists, Bruce Nauman (born 1941), with his wide-ranging experience in sculpture, installation, works on paper, film and video, and light and sound, and Gary Hill (born 1951), a purely video artist.

56 pp | pb | | 260 x 185 mm |
ISBN: 0642541728
Published 2002

OUT OF PRINT

Italian ateart & Italian cooking

Janet Jeffs

Blending recipes for traditional Italian dishes with reproductions of Italian paintings, this book evokes the timelessness of Italian cuisine—from insalata de funghi (mushroom salad), through ossobuco alla Milanese (Milan-style stewed veal shanks) and on to pasche ripiene (Amaretti filled peaches). Colour photographs of the dishes are complemented by an array of paintings by Caravaggio, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Bellotto and other Italian masters.

Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece, Blue poles 1952, has become an Australian icon and a key part of this country’s cultural history. For some, its controversial purchase by the National Gallery in 1973 signalled Australia’s economic and cultural dependence on the United States, while for others it showed that Australia was renegotiating its traditional ties and allegiances to Britain. This publication situates Blue poles in the broader development of Pollock’s career. Featuring paintings, drawings and prints produced from 1933 to 1952, it reveals Pollock’s interest in Mexican mural painting, French Surrealism and Native American art. Essays look at the artist’s life, at Blue poles’ first exhibition in New York in 1952, and its later reception in the US and Australia, from the 1970s to the present.

Material Culture provides an overview of the range and quality of contemporary Australian craft and design. Focusing on recent works in ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, jewellery, and metal, the publication presents, through the themes of structure, narrative and transformation, some of Australia’s most highly regarded object designers and craft practitioners. The book challenges perceptions about the nature of objects and their place in Australia’s cultural landscape, emphasising the diversity of this country’s practitioners and the broad range of cultural backgrounds they bring from around the world.

Albert Namatjira was a member of the Aranda people of Central Australia (now referred to as the Western Aranda or Arrernte language group). Following the success of his first solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1938, Namatjira became increasingly famous, with popular reproductions of his works being hung in countless Australian homes. The first prominent Indigenous artist to achieve household recognition in a modern idiom, Namatjira subsequently became a tragic figure set against the background of assimilation debates and entangled aesthetic prejudices of the time. His art became virtually ignored by the mainstream of the Australian art world. This book, especially commissioned by the Gordon Darling Foundation and the National Gallery for the centenary of Namatjira’s birth, redresses this neglect.

Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kellythe Ned Kelly paintings in the National Gallery of Australia

Murray Bail and Andrew Sayers

Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) wove a compelling narrative around the figure of Ned Kelly as the ‘wronged’ anti-hero who forged his own homemade armour and was pursued by police through the often featureless Australian bush. Though the Kelly myth didn’t start with Nolan’s paintings, his images remain the most enduring and instantly recognisable evocations of the legend. Kelly’s stark black silhouette gave Nolan his most powerful poetic metaphor for Australians’ relationship with their land. The text is by Andrew Sayers, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and Murray Bail, whose novels include the prize-winning Eucalyptus.

The celebrated Australian poet takes a wander through the national collection, setting works of art against poems from his 40 years of writing. The book selects around 100 poems or sections of poems from his oeuvre. Some poems are inspired by and specially written for the occasion, including ‘The Aboriginal cricketer’ and ‘A study of the nude’.

This publication explores the life and work of Douglas Annand (1903–1976), a key Australian Modernist, and a prolific artist and designer of great originality and style. Commissioned by many of Australia’s large companies (including P&O, Farmer’s and David Jones), Annand always steered on the side of art and aesthetics rather than pure commercialisation. Reproducing his designs for posters, sculpture, magazine covers, coins and stamps, and murals, this book covers his early years in Brisbane, his move to Sydney, his international exhibitions, the war years with the liberation he found in watercolours, and his venture into mural painting, textile design, and exploration of new materials and forms.

Frieda Kahlo (1907–1954) overcame acute personal injury and hardship to create dreamlike works of great emotional intensity. Celebrated by the Surrealists in her own lifetime, she also attained cult-like status for her extraordinary art and her tempestuous life with her famous artist husband Diego Rivera. A selection of paintings by Kahlo and Rivera forms the centre of this book, set in the broader context of Mexican art and the vitality of Mexico’s cultural and artistic life in the twentieth century. Essays touch on Kahlo’s life with Rivera, her self-portraits, her popularity and politics, and on the collectors of her work, Jacques and Natasha Gelman. Artists also represented include Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Leonora Carrington, Rafael Cidoncha and other major Mexican artists of the period.

Largely unrecognised during her lifetime, and the only woman in the Angry Penguin circle, Joy Hester’s bold, intuitive and expressive drawings were respected and admired by her closest friends—who included Sunday and John Reed, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman. This publication traces her remarkable life story and personality, her marriage to Albert Tucker, and her struggle with Hodgkins disease through to her death at age 40, in 1960. It examines her work from her early student drawings, through the concentration-camp inspired images of the mid 1940s, to her more personal images of children and lovers from the 1950s—poetic distillations which, in Barbara Blackman’s words, portray ‘haunting faces of love, of loss, of longing’.

Monet began collecting Japanese woodblock prints from the 1860s. This publication explores how Japanese prints and paintings helped shape his art over the subsequent six decades, influencing not only his style and choice of subject matter but the very way he saw the world about him. The book reproduces Japanese prints and images which we know Monet saw, or is likely to have seen, and reproduces Monet’s paintings of his own pays, the native countryside where he was raised—in the Seine valley from Le Havre on the Normandy coast to Paris. His renderings of these landscapes best show how, though Monet never travelled to Japan, Japanese art shaped his vision of the world.

Monet began collecting Japanese woodblock prints from the 1860s. This publication explores how Japanese prints and paintings helped shape his art over the subsequent six decades, influencing not only his style and choice of subject matter but the very way he saw the world about him. The book reproduces Japanese prints and images which we know Monet saw, or is likely to have seen, and reproduces Monet’s paintings of his own pays, the native countryside where he was raised—in the Seine valley from Le Havre on the Normandy coast to Paris. His renderings of these landscapes best show how, though Monet never travelled to Japan, Japanese art shaped his vision of the world.

The creator of such iconic works as The thinker, The kiss and The burghers of Calais, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) was a contemporary of the Impressionists. But his work arguably has as much connection with the Symbolists, the fin de siecle and the shift from traditional form towards Abstraction—placing him less at the end of the classical tradition stemming from Michelangelo, and more in company with Maillol and Brancusi. Offering this viewpoint, these essays consider the artist’s life, work and his tremendous legacy, by reviewing his sculptures, drawings, and discussing letters relating to the acquisition of some of his works by the National Gallery of Victoria.

160 pp | pb | | 260 x 185 mm |
ISBN: 0642541892
Published 2001

OUT OF PRINT

FederationAustralian art and society 1901–2001

Edited by John McDonald

An artistic survey of the Australian people from 1901 to the start of the new millennium, this century-wide overview is collected under the headings of ‘From Gallipoli to Homebush Bay’, ‘Beginnings’, ‘The Land’, ‘Cities and Suburbs’, ‘Boom and Bust’, ‘Patriotic Duty’, ‘At Ease’, ‘Encounters’ and ‘Designing the Australian Experience’. Selections include both classic and less-known works, and works which caused scandal or controversy of some kind when first shown. They are primarily drawn from the national collection, with specially selected works from other Australian galleries and museums.

264 pp | pb | | 290 x 240 mm |
ISBN: 064254123X
Published 2000

OUT OF PRINT

Painting foreverTony Tuckson

Tim Fisher and Terence Maloon

Tony Tuckson (1921–1973) is one Australia’s lesser-known important contemporary artists—a private artist (he usually painted in his spare time while Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales) who produced some of this country’s finest Expressionist-style works. This publication is weighted towards his more mature paintings and drawings, with their intuitive, abstract economy, works which he created from 1958 up to 1973, when he died at the peak of his painterly powers.

64 pp | pb | | 290 x 235 mm |
ISBN: 0642541117
Published 2000

OUT OF PRINT

The Book of Kells and the art of illumination

Brian Kennedy, Margaret Manion and Bernard Meehan

The Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript in Latin containing the four Gospels of the New Testament, is a masterwork of Western calligraphy. Regarded as Ireland's finest national treasure, it is on permanent display at the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Transcribed by Celtic monks around 800, it features the ornate swirling motifs typical of Insular illumination, with figures of humans, animals and mythical beasts, and decorative Christian symbolism, knotwork and interlacing patterns. Its vibrant colour sources include lapis lazuli from the Himalayas. This publication celebrates the loan of one of the Book of Kells volumes, the Gospel of St Mark, displayed at the National Gallery in 2000. It features essays on Celtic Ireland and the illumination tradition, and also discusses and reproduces individual folios.

This publication introduces the National Gallery’s Frances Derham collection of childrens art—comprising 10 000 works, with relating documentation and correspondence. Derham, a renowned child art educator and artist, collected these works from the 1930s to the 1980s. They provide rare insight into the creative spirit of children aged 5–14, from both Australian and overseas social, political and cultural traditions. Experiences are as diverse as refugee children’s recollections of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War, the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the building of the Panama Canal, cattle mustering at Aurukun mission station in northern Australia, school life, and an Inuit mother cleaning a seal. The collection includes a rich holding of Indigenous children’s art from northern Australia and New Guinea

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) considered his drawings as an intimate means of artistic expression—the ‘purest’ and ‘most direct’. His method of execution varied, from charcoal, pencil, crayon, etcher’s burin, lithographic tusche, to paper cut. Frequently his subject was the female form. This small book, which includes illustrations from Jazz and other works, reproduces drawings from late in the artist’s career, when he created series in the great French tradition of the artists book (livre de peintre), fusing original prints with chosen texts.

Of earth and firethe TT Tsui Collection of Chinese art in the National Gallery of Australia

Maud Girard-Geslan

Focussing on the 31 objects which comprise the National Gallery’s TT Tsui Gift of Chinese art, this publication reproduces work spanning almost five millennia. Explaining for the general reader the art, tradition and an archaeological overview of China, featured items range from a third-millennium BC Neolithic painted pottery jar, 8th century BC bronze ritual vessels, glazed earthenware horses and camels and a thousand-year-old limestone Buddha head, through to a polychrome enamelled lidded vase from the 18th century.

The Antipodean group comprised seven artists—Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, John Percival, Clifton Pugh and Robert Dickerson, along with the art critic Bernard Smith—who championed the role of the image in art through a landmark exhibition at the Victorian Artists’ Society in August 1959. Their ‘Antipodean Manifesto’, drafted to accompany the exhibition, subsequently generated a riposte from champions of action painting and abstract expressionist work—including the ‘9 Sydney Artists’ group comprising Ian Fairweather, John Olsen, John Coburn and others. This publication, sampling the work of both groups, revisits the artistic debate which reverberated through 1950s and 60s Australia.

This book was published to celebrate the first major Australian exhibition of ukiyo-e art (images of the ‘floating world’), held at the National Gallery in 1998. Under the headings of ‘Low city’, ‘High city’, ‘Men as women’, ‘Embracing desire’, ‘Pleasure town’ and ‘Beauty and violence’, the book traces the development of ukiyo-e style from decorative and poetic works to explicit, powerfully charged erotic ones over the period from 1600 to 1868. It features prints, paintings, screens and costumes.

While conceding the difficulty of comprehensively defining this most undogmatic and democratic form of art, this publication examines Australian ‘folk art’—under the headings of scrimshaw, Indigenous objects, furniture, ceramics, quilts, textiles and rugs, bird-scares and decoys, metalwork, toys and miscellaneous objects. It samples the glory of an array of everyday objects: from bush furniture and the Rajah quilt (1841), to shell necklaces, farm bird-scares cut from galvanised iron, and the ‘vernacular’ ceramic vases and bowls of 1930s Melrose ware.

Between 1909 and 1929, Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Russian Ballet) transformed the interpretation of dance. Bringing together leading modern artists, composers and choreographers, these productions, with their exuberance, colour and originality, caused a sensation and revitalised the moribund ballet of the day. This publication sketches the Ballets Russes story from its St Petersburg origins through to the legendary impact of the three companies that visited Australia between 1936 and 1940. Showcasing the National Gallery’s remarkable holdings of Ballets Russes costumes collected since 1973, it reproduces images of costumes designed by Léon Bakst, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Georgio de Chirico and others, along with drawings and set designs, photographs and programs.

Australia and the United States were the last two great landmasses to be explored and settled by Europeans. The encounter between man and nature, and the portrayal of new, expanding frontiers, inspired artists of exceptional ability in both nations. Ranging from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer in America, and from John Glover to Tom Roberts in Australia, this publication opens a dialogue between the artworks of the two new worlds, bringing together more than 100 major nineteenth-century landscape works by artists both known and little known—exploring essential similarities and differences in theme, style, social and political origin, as well as the traditions of the picturesque and the sublime and of genius loci.

This publication showcases three contemporary American women artists who focus on issues of gender power and the body in an image-and-word saturated society. Producing broadly ‘activist art’, these women use readymade cultural artefacts from advertising, television, movies and magazines (also touching on graffiti and rap) while maintaining a critical distance from, and subverting, that material. Their films, slideshow projections, installations, photographs, posters and framed text and photography attack consumerism, militarism, sexism and the power of the advertising medium itself.

This innovative children’s book, first published in 1997, looks at the many animals depicted in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and provides a name of the animal both in English and in the Aboriginal language of the artist.

This publication reproduces the National Gallery’s complete set of the 100 etchings, engravings and aquatints which comprise Picasso’s Vollard suite. Named for Ambroise Vollard (Picasso’s sometime art-dealer and publisher) and produced in the 1930s, the suite embraces several themes close to Picasso’s heart, including the Classically derived subjects of the Minotaur (man-beast), linking the conscious and unconscious, and Pygmalion (which provided material for Picasso’s projection of himself as artist-lover, and was inspired by his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter). Picasso worked with the outstanding French intaglio printer of the day, Roger Lacourière, and the suite is a fine example of technical virtuosity.

Scottish-born Ian Fairweather (1891–1974), described in this book as a ‘nomad’ and ‘itinerant’, an ‘escapist utopian recluse’, is one of Australia’s great twentieth-century painters. The drawings reproduced here, largely from the period 1941–55, are the fruit of his many travels through Asia, the subcontinent and Australia. Rendered in ink and watercolour, pencil and gouache, and PVA laden with powder pigments, the works are transparent, intense and instinctive. Lucid and open yet often meticulously reworked, they evoke the people and landscapes of China, Bali, India and Australia, in Fairweather’s striking personal hybrid style fused from Chinese calligraphy and the pictorial traditions of Europe.

Scottish-born Ian Fairweather (1891–1974), described in this book as a ‘nomad’ and ‘itinerant’, an ‘escapist utopian recluse’, is one of Australia’s great twentieth-century painters. The drawings reproduced here, largely from the period 1941–55, are the fruit of his many travels through Asia, the subcontinent and Australia. Rendered in ink and watercolour, pencil and gouache, and PVA laden with powder pigments, the works are transparent, intense and instinctive. Lucid and open yet often meticulously reworked, they evoke the people and landscapes of China, Bali, India and Australia, in Fairweather’s striking personal hybrid style fused from Chinese calligraphy and the pictorial traditions of Europe.

The oil paintings of E Phillips Fox in the National Gallery of Australia

Mary Eagle

Both a scholarly text for the student and a guide for the more general admirer of Fox’s paintings, this publication addresses 15 Fox works held in the national collection, ranging from A view of the Tambo river 1884–85 to Sketch portrait of Henry Gyles Turner 1914. With its biographical thread, the book describes each work in the context of the artist’s personality and life, while indicating diverse ways of looking at the paintings: via biography, style, theme, content, form, and craft. It provides full details on inscriptions, provenance, exhibition history and related works.

Of the so-called Australian Impressionists, Tom Roberts perhaps most took the national role to heart, and made the most convincing statements about the rural way of life. His most significant creative years were from 1885 to 1901, when he travelled repeatedly between city and bush—between the ‘swells’ and the shearers, drovers and cattlemen. Roberts is prominent among late nineteenth century Australians in describing a recognisably understated landscape, lifestyle and evoking the Australian light. This publication looks at 23 Roberts works in the National Gallery’s collection, ranging from his portrait of his father, c 1870s, through In a corner on the McIntyre 1895, and on to Under Ben Lomond 1928.

The narrative of the Wagilag Sisters and Wititj the Olive Python is a creation story of the Yolngu people of Central and eastern Arnhem Land. It is of central importance to their social life and rituals, ceremony and song, and the laws relating to authority, kinship, territory and marriage. The narrative also binds together groups possessing different parts of the story: the artists of the Liyagalawumirr clan and related artists from Central Arnhem Land, and the clans of Eastern Arnhem Land. This publication explores the pictorial representation of the tale across four generations of Yolngu artists, reproducing works from the 1930s to the 1990s.

John Kauffmann (1864–1942) has been described as an artistic loner in dandy attire. He left little commentary or memoirs on his work. This book sketches his life, with an overview of Pictorialism and soft-focus photography from the 1890s to about the 1920s, when it was eclipsed by Modernism. Kauffman’s photography is set against painted works by his contemporaries: Elioth Gruner and Clarice Beckett, and the more successful contemporary photographer Harold Cazneaux.

Marking our timesselected works of art from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection of the National Gallery of Australia

Avril Quaill

Celebrating the richness and diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in contemporary Australia and in the National Gallery’s collection, this book highlights a selection of major artists and features new developments in media and artistic idioms. From bark paintings and weaving to photography, video and installations, it encompasses artists from Arnhem Land, Wadeye and the islands of the Tiwi people near Darwin, the central Australian desert regions, the Kimberley, north Queensland and the Torres Strait, as well as the urban and rural areas of the continent’s seaboard.

Reproducing key works from Paris’s Musée d’Orsay and other collections, this publication presents the full vigour and richness of Parisian life at the end of the nineteenth century. Evoking the city through its celebrated landmarks and events, it examines the iconography of the Eiffel Tower, the grand boulevards, the Seine, the theatres, opera, and cafés, Montmartre, and the universal exposition of 1889. The book features the art of the Salons, of Pierre Bonnard and the Nabis group, and examines the rise of photography, Symbolism and Art Nouveau.

Celebrating the achievement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, and published in connection with the first exhibition of such art to tour to India, this book focuses on the work of George Milpurrurru, John Mawurndjul and Brian Nyinawanga (from Arnhem Land), Kwementway Kngwarreye (from the desert), Roy Wiggan and Rover Thomas (from the Kimberley), Ken Thaiday (from Torres Strait) and Fiona Foley (from urban Australia). The work of these artists is based in ancient traditions, while reflecting the realities of Indigenous people living in a modern world, and the great social, political and cultural upheavals of the past 200 years.

112 pp | (National Gallery of Australia | with the National Gallery of Modern Art | New Delhi)
ISBN:
Published 1996

JMW Turner (1775–1851) was a key figure in the development of modern European art. Published on the occasion of the first major Australian exhibition of Turner’s oils and watercolours, this book celebrates this Romantic landscape painter who laid the foundation for Impressionism. His works celebrate the glory and fury of nature (sky and sea), as well as the Industrial Revolution’s mechanical power and speed. Essay themes include Turner and his coterie of fellow artists, ‘patriotism, progress and the picturesque’ in Turner’s Britain, the burning of the houses of parliament, Turner’s watercolours and his celebrated depictions of Venice, and Turner’s impact on the origins of Australian colonial landscape painting (John Glover was an acquaintance of Turner, before leaving Britain to reside in Tasmania).

This book looks back at the tumultuous year of rebellion which signalled wideranging changes in culture, society and politics. Idealism, altered consciousness, new popular music and experiments in social and personal relations were paralleled by explosive new brands of art. Op, Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, Earth Art and Happenings, and experimental film and video usurped traditional painting on canvas and sculpting in bronze and stone. The work of Australians Martin Sharp and Richard Larter is set alongside those from overseas: Robert Crumb’s comic strips, Christo’s packed coast, Roy Lichtenstein’s screenprints, and the work of Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Bridget Riley.

Exploring the visual power of the Indian image, and useful approaches for engaging with Indian art, this publication features over 100 masterpieces created for Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Muslim patrons over a 2000 year period. Under the headings of ‘Gods and Goddesses’, ‘Enlightened Saviours’, ‘Auspicious Guardians’ and ‘The Royal Image’ the book traces the history and achievement of Indian culture, reproducing paintings, statues, manuscripts, mandalas, panels and textiles from some of the world’s great collections.

Traditions of Asian arttraced through the collection of the National Gallery

Edited by Michael Brand

An introduction to the Gallery’s Asian collection, ranging from a Middle Joma period Japanese ceramic vessel (c2500–1500 BC) through to a self-portrait by the prominent 20th century Indonesian painter Affandi and the work of avant-garde Chinese printmakers post the events of Tian’anmen Square in 1989. Mediums include pottery, textiles, paintings and sculptures, palm-leaf strip manuscripts, Mughal manuscript paintings, calligraphy and religious hangings. Consideration is also given to the region’s religious traditions, migration, and trade.

This is a selection of essays published in collaboration with the National AIDS Campaign, and in association with the largest exhibition on the subject of HIV/AIDS to be staged in Australia. Contributors include William Yang, Dennis Altman, Lynn Sloan, Richard Coles, Carole S Vance, Jan Zita Grover and others.

Rover Thomas spent most of his working life as stockman in the Eastern Kimberley (north-western Australia). He started painting regularly from 1981, quickly gaining notice for his vigorous, vibrant work with its flowing forms and visual textures, which gave Europeans a new perspective on Aboriginal art and depiction of ‘country’. The text shows how Thomas’s personal style uses both plan view and profiles, often simultaneously, and how his delineating of shapes by white dots is deeply imbued with the traditional conventions of Kimberley rock art and body painting.

The oil colours of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia

Mary Eagle

This publication focuses on the Gallery’s collection of 46 Streeton works ranging from Sandrige (painted on cigar-box wood in 1884) through to his late canvas In a London garden c1934. Tracing Streeton’s career, the book tells how he painted his youthful works of the 1880s and 90s alongside artist friends Charles Condor and Tom Roberts—camping in a farmhouse overlooking the Yarra River at Heidelberg, near Melbourne, and then (with Roberts) on the shores of Sydney harbour. He painted in London from 1897, before returning to spend the last two decades of his life working in Melbourne, where his late work evoked a peaceful pastoral Australia.

The oil colours of Arthur Streeton in the National Gallery of Australia

Mary Eagle

This publication focuses on the Gallery’s collection of 46 Streeton works ranging from Sandrige (painted on cigar-box wood in 1884) through to his late canvas In a London garden c1934. Tracing Streeton’s career, the book tells how he painted his youthful works of the 1880s and 90s alongside artist friends Charles Condor and Tom Roberts—camping in a farmhouse overlooking the Yarra River at Heidelberg, near Melbourne, and then (with Roberts) on the shores of Sydney harbour. He painted in London from 1897, before returning to spend the last two decades of his life working in Melbourne, where his late work evoked a peaceful pastoral Australia.

Fashion designers, as opposed to ‘mere tailors and dressmakers’, are a relatively recent phenomenon—beginning with Charles Worth, an Englishman working in Paris in the 1860s, who established the first haute couture fashion house. This precedent inspired later household names, such as Gabrielle Chanel, Christian Dior, Yves St Laurent, through to Rei Kawakubo, Zandra Rhodes, Romeo Gigli and Vivienne Westwood. The work of these designers and others’ is represented by apparel, album sketches and stencil illustrations drawn principally from the National Gallery’s collection.

Grace Cossington SmithA life, from drawings in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia

Daniel Thomas

This publication comprises text originating from the author’s ‘many Saturday afternoon visits’ to Grace Cossington Smith during 1970–71 and his subsequent research, matched up with almost 1400 little-known drawings from 51 of Smith’s sketchbooks held in the National Gallery’s collection. The sketchbooks, running from 1910, when Smith was an 18-year-old art student, through to the 1950s, include works from a productive sketching trip to Europe. There are black or coloured pencil drawings of such diverse subjects as old boots and gardening tools, domestic interiors, casual portraits of family and friends, of passenger ships and evocations of Stonehenge and English cathedrals.

Commemorating the first exhibition of poster art in Australia, this publication surveys the National Gallery’s collection of over 5000 works spanning more than 100 years. Posters range from a mid 1850s ST Gill theatrical bill, continue through Norman Lindsay’s Word War I recruiting posters, and on to Douglas Annand’s work and James Northfield’s and Percy Trompf’s tourism posters of the 1930s. The survey closes with the psychedelia of Martin Sharp’s posters from the 1960s and early 70s, work by Mambo Graphics and Sally Morgan, and the Gallery’s particularly strong holdings of work by alternative artist groups such as Another Planet, Chameleon, Earthworks and Redback.

Published to accompany the most significant exhibition of Surrealist art staged in Australia, this book features 11 thematic essays: on Surrealist cinema and photography, Freud’s iconic influence, the role of sexuality and violence, a study of Japanese Surrealism, and a survey of Surrealism’s vibrant legacy today—with an additional section on Australian Surrealism in the 1930s and 40s. The book reproduces over 300 images of some of the most celebrated works by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Georgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Hannah Höch.

Being distanced from European Surrealism by time and space, Australian Surrealism found its own direction, terms and specific imagery, and is more difficult to locate as a specific ‘movement’. It was adapted to the particular needs of its artists, depicting Australia’s culture and landscape, and the psychic drama of the Second World War. This publication views work from the 1930s and 40s, when European Surrealism was most strongly felt here. Key artists represented are James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Robert Klippel, Jeffrey Smart. Douglas Roberts, Peter Purves Smith, Klaus Friedeberger, Eric Thake, Geoffrey Graham and Max Dupain.